The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming (23 page)

I wonder if Ryan is in here because his celebrity
pulls priority treatment, or because he has the dubious distinction
of being Harvester infected as well as being at-risk of exposure to
an engineered nano-virus.

I look to Lyra, who shakes her head to confirm this
procedure will do little to forestall his fate. I think about
Horton, about what his life will be like, assuming he’s accepted
Kali’s “gift”. He’ll have his life, or a kind of life, but he’ll
never be able to return to service, to his comrades-in-arms. And
that, in turn, makes me think about Jak Straker, also exiled from
her surviving people because of what she became.

It takes me a surprising amount of time to get around
to realizing the two of them are versions of me and Lisa. I agreed
to my conversion, knowing what I was likely buying. Lisa didn’t—she
just woke up in her own grave in her current state, after I’d
inadvertently passed her the Seed of her alt-world Mods. Neither of
us intended or wanted it to happen to her.

But Yod did.

That gets my anger burning fresh: All of this is in
Yod’s direct control. He’s either controlling it or allowing it,
because he wants the human race to stay just the right degree of
afraid, so they won’t repeat a past none of them remember.

“What is it?” Lyra catches me brooding.

“Just thinking about Sergeant Horton,” I
downplay.

My friends-turned-hostages decide to give the
“patients” in here with us at least some privacy. Rick and Anton
look freshly stoked to get back to their research, now with more
lives on the line.

We say our good-byes, and with nothing better to do,
I try to settle into one of the couches and consider my best next
move.

Lisa watches me from her own cell, trying not to look
like she is.

They bring us food, and I get to experience
first-hand the bland, bizarre semi-vegetarian diet that Earth has
been shipping to Mars.

“The protein source is a combination of soy and
farmed maggots,” Lisa unhappily informs me. Despite this, I decide
it’s better to eat with my mouth rather than to absorb the
nutrients through my fingers, especially sitting here under UNCORT
scrutiny. It tastes like vaguely-off tofu and raw shellfish. I
think I prefer the Katar’s giant-insect delicacies.

Almost immediately, my Mods detect mildly-radioactive
tracer media in the food, probably designed to give UNCORT a look
at how my digestive tract works (or maybe to help them track me). I
don’t react visibly, but let my nanites break down and neutralize
the isotopes.

Lyra’s been brought a flashpad to let her interface
with the nano-research team. An alarm has been integrated into the
firewall to detect any attempts by me to access it, but she can
show me what comes up on her screen.

“Twenty-seven confirmed infected,” she mourns.
“That’s just of the ones that came back.” She scrolls through what
she’s been fed, then shows me the screen. “This is interesting:
Some of the drones that hit us
were
different than what
we’ve seen before. The nanotech was starting to reinforce their
skeletons with carbon fiber and steel, and building a secondary
motor system to replace the decomposing muscles. They’re slowly
being converted into simple bots, all the necessary materials
extracted from the body or the immediate environment. If we hadn’t
have disabled them all, who knows what they would have constructed?
But the changes are so far only being seen in the drones that hit
us here, not the ones we’ve checked from the Pax Mountain
fight.”

“Is that because Asmodeus had them buried here
longer?” Lisa wonders. “He probably planted them in the forest
before we blew the crater.”

“No,” I shoot down. “It’s not just gestation time.
The Katar had a ‘volunteer’, one of their warriors who was hit and
let them study his conversion. He suffered the whole process alive.
But his body eventually degraded, decomposed until the muscles
wouldn’t function anymore. The module produced the preservative
media to keep the tissues viable for a few weeks, but that was it.
Upon examination, his body was just rotting flesh and bone. We
haven’t seen one build anything more than the control module, not
until now. This is new.”

“They
can’t
be new,” Lisa argues. “Those
improved drones were buried almost under our feet. We’ve been
watching the site since Lieutenant Straker painted it for us and we
blew it to hell from orbit. Then we
thought
we checked it
thoroughly before we built. We pulled wrecked bots and human
remains, but no activity has been detected, not until today.”

“The crater and rims were laced with natural caves.
Some of them may have survived the blast, or maybe he just used the
caves to plant the drone-tubes before they were collapsed by the
mass-driver hit,” I guess. I turn my face to the cameras watching.
“You need to check, now. Use Ground-Penetrating Radar, look for
airspaces or shadows that could be more tubes. The insulation layer
that blocked your EMP probably also defeats your signal scan, and
the high magnetite content in the rock would make them hard to see
clearly.”

No one replies. I can only hope they decide to take
my advice seriously, and not instantly discount it in their
doubt.

“So those things were here, gestating or whatever,
since before Asmodeus buggered out of here, before he really
started hitting Katar and Pax with drones, before the siege,” Lisa
puts together the likely timeline.

“Either these drones take longer to form, or he was
saving them for some reason,” I hypothesize.

“Saving them for us?” she wonders, then specifies:
“For the Earth force?”

“He couldn’t know we’d build a base here,” Sharp
insists, inserting herself into the conversation from three
polycarb panels away.

“He was probably intending to catch you sweeping the
site, like he did today at the Pax Keep,” I let her know my prior
guess. “But when he saw you start building here, it would have been
like Christmas. I’m sure he could barely wait for the perfect
moment to spring his trap on you.”

“Catching us as we were crawling home,” Lyra grimly
accepts. “Just when we thought we were safe.”

“This Asmodeus…” I hear Ryan rasp from his
restraints. He must have come to while we were talking. “Is he
really that smart?”

“He was devastating when he was just human, back on
Earth,” Lisa remembers. But she never had to face him first-hand.
Or see his atrocities up-close.

“I’ve only had one other opponent who was sharper
than Ange Appolyon,” I admit. “Thankfully, we wound up on the same
side in the end.”

“Was that… Zarovich?” He lets me know he’s done his
homework, studied my history, maybe thinking he’d have the
opportunity to get me on camera.

I nod, and can’t help but look at Lisa. She killed
Zarovich herself. First-hand. Up-close. I think she still feels a
little bit bad about that, or bent because I did. All I get now is
ice in her dark metallic eyes.

“Zarovich had a moral code of sorts, made him do the
right thing in the end,” I defend the most-wanted villain of the
early twenty-first century. “Ange—Asmodeus—proudly has none. He’s
vicious, sadistic… He does what he does just to prove he can, at
least when he isn’t getting off sexually on it. As far as I know,
there were only two people in the world he ever remotely cared
about…” I let out a sad chuckle. “He died saving one of them.” But
that doesn’t make him redeemable.

“But this one… isn’t him,” Ryan’s heard. “The real
one died in… twenty-twenty-five… twenty-six…?”

“And that makes him even more dangerous, because he
knows that. He knows he’s just a copy, made from preserved DNA and
reconstructed memory files.”

“That’s why he has no qualms about cloning himself,”
Lyra understands.

“And those clones don’t care about dying,” I relay
what I’ve seen. “They just upload themselves to wherever his ‘hub’
or network or whatever is.”

“We need to trace that network,” Lisa gives the
obvious conclusion.

“That’s why we were so hot to take the Pax Mountain,”
Lyra reminds us. “We didn’t get what we needed from the remains we
found in the Stormcloud wreck. We were hoping there’d be a better
specimen left at Pax, an intact brain module or other bodily
tech.”

“He knew that. He probably knew you’d move to recover
the first clone’s remains to examine, and set me up to tell you
where you’d find another one,” I confess my unwitting
culpability.

“It wouldn’t have mattered,” Lisa tries to absolve
me. “If you’d lied, if you’d told us Asmodeus wasn’t in the Pax
caves when we hit it, Command wouldn’t have believed you. We’d have
gone in anyway.”

It suddenly galls me that she keeps referring to
herself as part of this paranoid intolerant idiots’ brigade, that
she can’t let go of a duty that died while we were sleeping.

“Colonel Ram…” Ryan calls out to me. “You… I know you
saved my life, carried me out of there… I want to say thank you…
But… I’m
scared
… I’m sc… I don’t want to die, not like this…
I know you can save me… save me again…”

“I’m sorry,” I tell him softly, feeling small with
everyone’s eyes on me. “I really can’t.”

“I… I don’t
care
what it takes…” He’s starting
to struggle against his bonds. “You… You changed
her
,
Colonel Ava… I don’t care what it takes… If you have to be…
intimate
… with me, then please… I
beg
you…
please
…”

“It really doesn’t work that way.” I don’t tell him
how it
will
work: If I
was
able to give him the last
Seed I’m carrying, if somehow it would accept him, he wouldn’t be
him anymore. He’d be consumed, just like the Harvester infection is
going to consume him.

“
Please
… I have
influence
… I can
help
you… Make them see that you’re good… I’ll do anything
you want me to do…”

He’s starting to rave, to panic as he’s realizing his
fate. Thankfully, the couch recognizes his elevated vitals and
knocks him down with a sedative.

“
Why won’t you help him?!
” Ryan’s female aide
pounds her fist on the transparency and continues making his plea
for him, tears streaming down her cheeks. “
Why won’t you help
us?!
”

“He
can’t
,” Sharp tells her firmly. She nods
up at the cameras. “
They
won’t let him.”

The aide slides down the barrier and curls up on the
floor, sobbing.

Lyra settles into her work, reviewing the data being
collected from the recovered Harvesters, as well as any signals
that her equipment was able to pick up and record during the fight.
(Unfortunately, my presence flooded her gear with anomalous noise,
making it harder to track any command signals.) I remind her that
the drones can run effectively on preset algorithms, so may not
have needed any command signals, but she smartly argues that the
various stages of the attack were too well-timed. Asmodeus must
have had eyes on the battle from start to finish, and I’m sure—no
matter how well he’d pre-programmed the attack—he wouldn’t have
been able to resist running the drones himself when he saw how the
action was proceeding.

“So either he was on some high-ground overlooking
both the Pax site
and
here, or he hacked your satellites,” I
assume easily. And that means he was watching me the whole time as
well. I reflexively beat myself up thinking that if I’d have just
looked in the right direction I would have seen him, but I know he
was probably using nano-cams…

“Scan the west end of the Spine Range,” I tell the
sentry cameras. “He may have planted micro-cameras to watch the
action.” But as I say it, I realize he’d likely have set them to
disintegrate as soon as the battle was done. (Unless he’s still
watching us.)

Not relying on our watchers to pass along my advice,
Lyra sends it directly to Anton, who’s been working on how Asmodeus
hacked his video through to Earth.

I suddenly become conscious of the fact that I’m
consistently having more and more trouble any time I get too close
to her (but then the space we’re locked together in isn’t very
large). I’m involuntarily distracted, and increasingly aroused. I
find my eyes drifting over her, watching her. I keep drinking in
her scent. I’m wishing that there was polycarb between us, some
kind of solid barrier. I have this overwhelming impulse to touch
her. I remember her naked body, her pale skin…

Lisa suddenly chuckling at me snaps me out of it.

“I was just thinking…” she muses at my expense, “did
you ever see that old TV show
Doctor Who
? It ran forever on
British television, started when my parents were kids. I just
realized you remind me of the main character: Practically immortal,
brilliant, charming, eccentric… you even show up with a new face
from time-to-time…
and
he has this disturbing penchant for
collecting impressionable young women.”

Lyra blushes, buries her eyes in her screen like she
didn’t hear, but I see her fingers tremble as she works the pad. I
give Lisa a pained, sarcastic grin, but I’m only pissed because
she’s pretty much right on.

“And anywhere he happens to go, some
world-threatening horror conveniently strikes, and only
he
seems to be able to do anything about it,” Jackson’s voice comes
over the intercom, letting us know he’s been listening.

“I remember they had an explanation for that on the
show,” I deflect.

“They did,” he accepts. “What’s yours?”

“Not many places I can be around here where there
won’t
be some world-threatening horror.”

I see Lyra smile out of the corner of my eye. And
then my eyes drift down the open collar of her jumpsuit, try to
make out the curves of her small breasts through the thin fabric. I
have to look away.